


folded and unfolded and unfolding (i am)

by boxedblondes



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Introspection, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, POV Second Person, my current mental state is very evident by the themes and events present in this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:42:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22052719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxedblondes/pseuds/boxedblondes
Summary: Even in youth, some ancient part of your brain must have already known that the future was inevitable, that it would be here before you knew it. Hence the dreams. Hence their progression, every single time: You are trapped. You want to escape, to run, to be free. Someone is following you and you know you must evade them, that to be caught is tantamount to certain death, to the destruction of all you are. Running, always running, with no destination in sight. Just the deep-down knowledge that you must go, that you must go now.Imprisonment. Escape. Capture. Over and over again.After Amsterdam, Theo doesn't go back to New York.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 18
Kudos: 108





	folded and unfolded and unfolding (i am)

**Author's Note:**

> \- Warnings for discussion of suicidal thoughts and brief references to drug/alcohol use and other illegalities.
> 
> \- Translations for Dutch/Russian in the end notes. Disclaimer: I have a very rudimentary knowledge of Dutch and exactly 1 knowledge of Russian, so please let me know if anything is wrong!
> 
> \- [My writing playlist for this fic](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/04bKi9RsMpZPQexRLYo2Qx?si=iYZmxpjWShaEy3UnhzgV4w), which was instrumental in creating the right "mood"
> 
> Title from "Colorblind" by Counting Crows

When you were a child, you used to dream you were trapped in some familiarly unfamiliar place, somewhere you’d never been in real life but which felt so heartbreakingly real within the dream that you could almost taste it on the tip of your tongue. A sense memory, an unshakeable sense of déjà vu. The hum in the air just before a lightning storm.

In these dreams, you would wander for hours through schools and hospitals, houses and forests. Abandoned places, utterly lost to the world. Gray and dim and thick with the cloying scent of acute abandonment. You would find yourself slowly sinking into despair - or rather, something deeper than despair, something closer to outright desperation. And then, just then, you would realize someone or something was following you, a sinister presence trying to find you in the silence and murk.

More often than not, you would wake in the morning and abruptly forget that you had dreamed at all, let alone what you had dreamed about. All that would remain was the sense of overwhelming loneliness, of fear and the slow death of hope and reason. As you got older, these dreams came less and less frequently until they basically stopped altogether, only to soon after be replaced by dreams of a different nature - your mother and the museum and the explosion - trapped again, though this time you knew exactly where you were and exactly what was going to happen next.

Over time these dreams faded, too, as dreams tend to do when the nightmare of adult life overshadows anything our juvenile minds can conjure up. Instead you started to dream of more mundanely terrifying things: forgetting your wallet at home and only realizing just as you get to the cash register, waking up from anesthesia in the middle of surgery, the deaths of friends and enemies alike. This change, more than anything else, served to confirm you what you already knew - you are getting old. 

And God, are you afraid of getting old. Even as the years creep up on you, old age starting to sink its claws into the meat of your mortal body, you are deeply, terribly afraid of getting ever older.

It occurs to you, of course, that you _have_ gotten older, that you are aging by the day - closer and closer to the interminable abyss of death and all that may or may not come after. The thing is, though, you don’t _feel_ old. And that makes all the difference, you think. You assume, like every human being on the planet, that old age comes suddenly, like the flip of a light switch. So what if you aren’t a kid anymore? So what if you are growing older and older still? You can’t stop it, can’t slow it down. You cannot face the truth of it head-on. All you can do is keep yourself in the fleece-warmed cocoon of denial. Like everyone else, painfully aware of their own mortality, you can push off the inevitable until it becomes an inevitability. Easy.

Your body, right now, is healthy and whole, and so you are easily able to deny yourself the truth - that age is slow and insidious, that you are becoming incrementally slower and weaker with every single day that passes - but your subconscious cannot be so easily fooled.

Even in youth, some ancient part of your brain must have already known that the future was inevitable, that it would be here before you knew it. Hence the dreams. Hence their progression, every single time: You are trapped. You want to escape, to run, to be free. Someone is following you and you know you must evade them, that to be caught is tantamount to certain death, to the destruction of all you are. Running, always running, with no destination in sight. Just the deep-down knowledge that you must go, that you must go _now_. 

Imprisonment. Escape. Capture. Over and over again.

There is one dream in particular you’ve never been able to shake, no matter how old you get. It goes like this: You are driving along the highway late at night, the dark shapes of trees pressing in around you from all sides and the new moon a black hole in the starless sky. You are tired, exhausted really. You have been driving for hours and you have to find a place to sleep soon. It is the middle of nowhere, a flat expanse of road and sky with only your headlights to tell you which is which. There are no other cars. In fact, now that you think of it, there haven’t been any other cars for miles.

Eventually, like a subdued beacon of hope, you find a motel by the side of the road. You pull into the lot and park beneath a streetlight, the sodium glow turning your skin hazy and jaundiced. At some point you must walk up to the front office and rent a room, because that’s what you would do in real life, but your sleeping mind just kind of skips over that part. The next thing you know, you’re locking the door behind you as you step into a dingy motel room with faded carpet that might have once been something approaching red, but is now a colorless, dirty smudge. 

You wouldn’t even think about setting foot in a place like this in your real, waking life, no matter how exhausted you were. But in this dream you simply take note of the thumbtacks and wads of hair and used condoms scattered under the bed like confetti and feel only vaguely nauseous. 

Maybe you climb on top of the bed and fall asleep under the fluorescent lights, maybe not. It depends on the night. It depends on the dream. Either way, you eventually discover that there is a family staying in the room next door to yours, a perfectly docile-looking nuclear unit of a mother and a father and a young, anonymous-looking son. They take one look at your filthy room and invite you to come stay in theirs. It’s a suite, they say, and you are welcome to take the couch. Normally, you would refuse, but you have just discovered that your door doesn’t actually lock, even if you turn the deadbolt. (Also, of course, this is a dream - and logic does not apply in dreams.) So you agree, and you tuck in for the night on the small sofa, even as unease starts to creep its icy fingers up your spine.

In the middle of the night, the boy tiptoes up to your makeshift bed and taps you on the shoulder. You are instantly awake as he tells you, whisper-quiet, that his parents intend to kidnap you and maybe kill you, or else do something nefarious that will end in your untimely demise. You have to pack up quickly, he says, and leave _right now_ before they wake up. So you collect your things and hurry to unlock the door, locks and deadbolts and chains and all manner of things meant to keep you from escaping. Your fingers are moving as slow and sticky as honey and soon there are the telltale sounds of people shifting and stirring from sleep behind you, but you can move no faster.

At some point you make it out to the parking lot, where you discover that the boys’ parents have awakened fully and are now coming after you. You drop your car keys, grapple for them on the ground, as they creep towards you across the pavement. They are gaining on you. There is not another soul around. No one will help you.

You find the keys, unlock your door, start the engine. Or you don’t. It depends on the night. It depends on the dream. You speed out of the parking lot and back onto that endless midnight street. Or you don’t. Your gas tank is running low. It has started to rain, big drops splattering like saliva against your windshield. The road is slick as oil, like black ice beneath your tires. Your windshield wipers aren’t working. They’re behind you, headlights big as dinner plates in your rearview mirror. They’re in the backseat, they’re in the passenger seat, they’re driving the car. You’re in the trunk, you’re in the backseat, you’re lying flush against the floorboards, body curled into the shadows so they can’t see you’re there. 

You’re lost, you’re captured, you’re doomed. And then you wake up.

-

After Amsterdam, after Antwerp, you don’t go home. Boris drives you to the airport in Brussels, walks you to the international departures gate and waves you off through the security checkpoint. You say goodbye and promise to call as soon as you land. You say he should stop by if he’s ever in New York for business. You hold out a hand for him to shake and he pulls you in for a big bear hug instead, says “Do not be a stranger, Potter.” And then you get in line for the metal detectors, socked feet cold against the linoleum floor as your shoes and belt rattle down the conveyor belt in a big plastic tub.

He waits for you, watching the whole time. As you’re sitting on a bench, retying your shoes, you look up and see him standing there, tiny in his big black coat across the wide expanse of the room. You lift a hand in his direction and he waves back at you, hand flapping open and closed like a child, until you are around the corner and out of sight. Only then, once you are sure he cannot see you, do you make an abrupt beeline for the closest ticket counter to ask about the next plane back to Amsterdam.

It’s utterly selfish, you know, to do this. To do what you are doing, to make the decisions you are actively making. But you realized the other day - trying to sleep on Boris’s couch, staring up at the popcorn ceiling as he dozed in a heroin daydream in the other room - that you can’t go back. Not to your old life, with all its messes and unfinished business. Not to the people you’ve failed and the places you’ve failed them in. And especially not to someplace 3,000 miles away from your painting, that last, golden thread connecting you to your mother - an umbilical cord stretching across space and time, through life and death.

It is almost New Year’s. You make a deal with yourself on the plane: You will go back to the hotel. If there are any vacancies, you will check in for one night, and then you will kill yourself. You will do it right this time, with more pills and a stronger stomach, or else an air bubble into your veins. And if there is no vacancy, you will take a train to The Hague and then you will see your bird one last time, and then you will do it there.

There is no vacancy. You buy a train ticket.

-

The years pass. You don’t like to think about it. The whole point of this was to leave your past behind, your old self and all your attachments. 

(Actually, the whole point was to take yourself out of the picture so you didn’t even have to think about how you’d fucked everything up beyond reason - but that plan was foiled as soon as your train pulled into the station and you realized they probably hadn’t even had time to ship your painting back to the Mauritshuis yet, let alone make it viewable to the public.)

 _Stupid, stupid_ , you berate yourself. After its theft and its miraculous, inconceivable recovery, _Het Puttertje_ is the most famous painting in the world. When - _if_ \- the museum decides to show it again, it will be with conditions. Armed guards, bulletproof glass, 24-hour security. The process could take months, if not years. 

God, you should have just stuck with the original plan and killed yourself straight away.

You’ve been staying in a cheap hotel near the Koekamp for a week when it occurs to you that you’ll probably need to find somewhere a bit more permanent. And then you start looking for apartments you can afford with the bag of cash Boris had given you, your half of the reward money, that had somehow, _somehow_ made it through airport security. And then you buy a tram card because maybe it would be nice to explore the city. And then you’re buying furniture to make your new house a little more home-y - and thank God the Dutch know how to make furniture - and food from farmers markets because you have to eat _something_. And then, and then, and then…

And then, miracle of miracles, it just feels a little easier to decide to live. A few years go by, and then a few more. You turn thirty and then forty, the days and weeks and months and years starting to slip by like quicksilver through your fingers. You find yourself a little older, a little softer, but still alive. There is no more Theodore Decker, not really. There is just the quiet American man who lives in a tiny apartment he pays for with the remains of the reward money and the paychecks he earns from his job at a quaint seaside café.

You start learning Dutch, in order to fit in better with the people around you, but then it turns out everyone here speaks English anyway, so your attempts become a little more half-hearted. Your corner of the city is quiet and in flux, a place for people coming and going from other places to stop for a moment and relax by the North Sea. You are anonymous here, a stone to be rolled around in the sand and pummeled by the waves into something polished and new. Different. 

It’s easy to be someone different here, a version of yourself with all the edges rounded off and the tangles unraveled. You have time to think, time to just _be_ as you wait on tables or sit in your apartment and watch the sun track buttery squares across the floorboards. With each year, it seems, comes something new to work through, some barb beneath your skin to slowly dig out and examine and soothe the hurt it leaves behind.

Your mother. Your father. Hobie. Pippa. Kitsey. Mrs. Barbour. Andy. All the people you’ve ever wronged, all the regrets you’ve amassed.

Part of you feels terrible for leaving them all behind, for leaving loose ends and burned bridges and years and years of selfish decisions in your wake. You’re a bad person, you know this. You always have been, in some way. It is best then, you reason, to remove yourself from everyone else’s lives so that they are no longer tainted by your presence. It’ll be better for them that way. 

Take Hobie, for instance. Should your forgeries be discovered, he’ll be able to explain about the painting and your involvement with it, your shady friend from childhood and how he whisked you away in the dead of night to somewhere in Europe, after which nobody ever heard from you again. Will he be confused, wondering where you went? Maybe. Will he be sad? Hard to tell, though you hope not. Will he miss you? After what you did? Not likely.

It’s the same with the others, you think. Your sudden disappearance, no explanations given, no trace of you since, will serve as an explanation of its own. An answer, if you will. And then everyone can move on without you. 

Well, _almost_ everyone.

You ditched your cell phone in a trash can at the airport in Belgium. After that, it was just you and a bag of European money and a one-way plane ticket to the Netherlands (paid for in cash so as to be untraceable, which is about as much foresight as you had about the whole thing). You didn’t even think of Boris until you’d been in The Hague for a week, waiting for news about _The Goldfinch_ , hoping beyond hope for a press release announcing its valiant return. When you finally did think of him, it was for the strangest reason: you’d run out of clean underwear.

You’d been keeping your clothes neatly folded in the hotel dresser. On your sixth morning in the city, you stumbled out of the bathroom, damp and eyeglass-less, and rummaged through the top drawer for a good several seconds before you realized you’d need to do laundry. As a last-ditch effort at delaying the inevitable, you had searched through your suitcase, empty except for the bag of money, and found nothing but a wrinkled envelope with your name on the front, tucked neatly into the front pocket. 

Specifically, the envelope said _Theo_ , not _Potter_ , so it took you longer than it probably should have to recognize it as Boris’s handwriting. The realization, when it hit, turned you frantic and you nearly tore through the actual letter trying to rip open the envelope.

 _Potter_ , it said,

_Have a safe flight and good luck back in New York. I am so sorry about all the hurt I have caused you, truly, and I will understand if you never want to speak to me again. But I will always be your friend, no matter what, and you will always be mine. You are a good person - I mean it. If you ever need me, just call and no matter where I am, I will come find you._

_Happy New Year!_

_Yours,_

_Boris_

You read it through twice and then sat down on the floor, still clad in only a thin bath towel, and cried like a child. You should never have thrown away your phone. You should have memorized Boris’s number. You should have left something, some breadcrumb of a trail, for him to find you. But you hadn’t, and now you were going to die in South Holland without telling him the thing you’d always failed to say - no matter how much you suspected he knew it anyway - which is that, much as you wish you didn’t, you loved him. Still do, in fact.

As the years go by, the ache and sting of this fact never leaves you. You could find him, probably, if you really tried. You could hire a private investigator and track him down, come to him on bended knee and apologize and beg for forgiveness. You could tell him, finally, what it is you feel for him. But you are a coward at the core, and so you don’t.

And so the years go by like days and before you know it, you’re as much a fixture of this place as the shoreline or the perpetual seagulls that swoop and squaw all day long. Your home is modest, small, not much more than a kitchen and a bathroom and a bed and a window that faces the sun in the morning and the moon in the evening. You get to know your neighbors and the people you work with - Issaac and Carolijn next door, Rudie who lives downstairs with his three parakeets, Marta and Arthur and Heleen in the café - and they get to know you, just a little, from the carefully parceled-out facts you give them, scrubbed clean and trimmed of anything incriminating: You were raised in New York City. You love art but didn’t have the money to study it in college. You used to be an antiques dealer. Your parents are dead. You came here for a fresh start.

They don’t ask for anything else, and you don’t offer it. You are comfortable in quietude, in your simple proximity to one another, and that is enough.

-

In the off-season, when the tourists have left for their own homes or warmer locales, Marta closes the café at noon and you spend your afternoons walking the beach or wandering De Haagse Markt in search of something to make for dinner. Today, as she closes up and sends you on your way, she remarks that the forecast shows a late-summer storm on the horizon.

You laugh. “Who told you that?” you ask. It was clear and cloudless when you walked to work this morning, what your mother would once have called a bluebird sky.

“Customer from yesterday,” Marta says. “Een beetje verdacht, you know?” She shakes her head. “Hard to believe, tourist could know more than me.”

It is hard to believe. Marta has lived here all her life, somewhere in the ballpark of fifty years. Her grandparents were Indonesian immigrants, fishermen desperate for the prosperity and political stability of The Netherlands. As she all-too-frequently likes to remind you, her people have the sea in their blood. More than once, she has struck up a conversation with you about wind patterns and barometric readings and other facts and figures far too technical for you to even pretend to understand.

But true enough, the morning sun has given way to stormy skies and clouds are already gathering close together as you make it to the beach. Bruised-black thunderclouds hang ominously overhead, fat with rain, so close you could almost touch them - a Winslow Homer sky over foaming, angry waves. You walk barefoot along the sand, pants rolled to your knees, and let the electricity in the air raise the tiny hairs on your arms.

The beach is mostly empty, just a few tourists milling about, scattered in ones and twos across the vast expanse of sand. You pass one of them, a woman, just as your right heel impales itself on a broken shell, and she winces in sympathy. You stop to inspect your foot and remove the offending bit of shell, a sliver as thin and sharp as glass. Blood pools to the surface in its wake, swelling up into one perfect, bright red pearl. You tuck the shard into your pocket and keep walking; the cut isn’t deep. Besides, the pain it leaves behind is clean, sharp and a little bit itchy, and it makes the world around you shine a little brighter.

It’s perhaps ten minutes before you pass another human being, this time a man, entirely over-dressed for the weather, which is achingly humid and overly warm in deference to the coming storm. You nod at him as you pass and offer up a “Goedemorgen,” keeping your attention focused on the ground in front of you. This is something you have picked up over the years, a way to blend in with the locals without letting either them or the tourists get too close of a look at you.

You get a dozen or so steps away before you realize the soft, ever-fainter sounds of footfalls against wet sand behind you have stopped. You turn around to ask the man if he’s okay, hoping he’s simply stopped to gaze out at the roiling sea instead of, somehow, dropping dead to the sand of a heart attack. (And, later, you will wonder why of all things this was what you were worried about. Not that a stranger had suddenly taken offense to your quiet hello and pulled a gun on you, but that he had died or hurt himself, or somehow just disappeared entirely. That he needed your help, instead of the other way around.)

The wind has whipped itself into a frenzy by now and sand stings your face and neck as you turn to look back at the man. Twenty feet away from you, he is staring back, black hair waving wildly around his face.

“Potter,” he says, quietly, but the wind is in his favor and the words come to you as clearly as if he were standing right next to you.

At first you think you’ve misheard him. It can’t be, it _can’t_. But then he says, louder now, “Theodore Decker.”

You haven’t heard anybody say your full name in years. In that moment, you understand quite acutely why people use the word _shocked_ to mean _surprised_. Your name - in his voice, in his accent - sends a spike of electricity through your entire body, like pressing your tongue to a 9-volt battery. (Something, coincidentally, you both used to do when plagued by a boredom even recreational drugs couldn’t cure.)

Of course it’s him. Who else could it be? How else did you really expect your life to turn out?

“Boris,” you say. The wind and flying sand grab the words from your mouth and wring all the sound out of them and you have to say it again, shouting this time. “Boris!”

Rain is starting to fall, great big salt-smelling drops that splash against your glasses like hand grenades. They blur and distort his shape into blackish smudges, but you can still see him well enough. Even after all this time, you think, you would know him anywhere.

“What are you doing here?” you shout, since he has yet to say anything besides variations of your name.

“Could ask you same thing,” he says back. 

His voice is flat, posture taut and rigid. In your youth, you would have been able to read every nuance of his current state of mind but now, obscured by the decades that have passed since you last saw him, you can tell only that he is very much pissed off.

You make a half-aborted motion to walk closer to him, then think better of it. “It’s pouring,” you say. “We should get inside.”

Boris laughs, short and sharp. “Has been fifteen years, and that is all you can think to say? No ‘Sorry Boris that I dropped off face of the Earth, made you think I was dead’? No apology, no explanation?”

“I don’t - ”

“Fuck you,” Boris spits. “Fuck. You.” 

The rain is really coming down now, your clothes wet and sticky with it. It reminds you of Amsterdam, of the blood and sweat and vomit plastering your dress shirt to your chest - an image you haven’t thought of in ages. There’s a part of you that wants to end this stand-off and just head back to your apartment, to hell with Boris if he wants to stand out here all day. But there’s also a part of you that knows you owe it to him to stay here and hear him out, whatever he wants to say. Besides, just knowing there’s a hot shower and warm bed waiting for you after all this, the promise of a dry towel against your wet skin, is enough to let you ignore the rain for the time being, even as it sluices off your hair and into your eyes.

“Say something,” Boris says, advancing one singular step in your direction. “Say _one fucking thing_ that will make me not come over there and beat the shit out of you. Has been a couple years, yes, but believe me I could still do it.”

You choke down a mouthful of rain and saltwater spray with a sodden sort of gasp. Boris’s request seems impossible, a Herculean task. But of course there’s only one thing you can say, one thing you’ve never said. One thing that would stop him in his tracks, even if just for a moment.

So you say it. “I love you.”

“What’s that? Cannot hear you over _fucking_ wind.”

“I love you,” you shout. The world is a grayish blur, wetness and weak light coalescing into a colorless mass all around you. The rain is thumping down so hard now that you can’t even see him anymore; you can’t see anything at all, really, so it comes as a complete and utter surprise when he rushes at you and tackles you to the ground, knees on your chest and forearm across your windpipe, cutting off your air.

“Fuck you, Potter,” he says. “You are the worst kind of person. Leaving your mess behind, running away to where? To here? Not a word to me, not a word to your fiancée, your people back in New York?”

You flail halfheartedly in an attempt to loosen his chokehold and succeed in gasping in enough air to choke out something garbled and wet-sounding and entirely unintelligible.

“Shut up. I am speaking and you are listening now. Okay?” It is not really a question but you nod as best you can, regardless. “You leave like that - poof! - and expect everyone to - what, just forget you? Keep living their lives like you were never even there? Your furniture man, he calls me couple months after Amsterdam and he says, ‘Please, Boris, you don’t have to tell me where he is. Just tell me he is okay.’ And I have to tell him that I can’t do that, that I have not heard from you and do not know where you are either.”

Boris takes a breath and shakes his head wildly, icy little droplets flying everywhere. “He could have died, Potter. You know that? While you are off here doing god-knows-what, having jolly good time, he could have died. He’s an old man, Potter. But no, you did not think of him. Did not think of anyone but yourself.”

Your vision is starting to go spotty at the edges from lack of oxygen, the rush of your heartbeat filling your ears, but still this thought - that Hobie could have died and you would never know it and he would never know that you are safe and well, finally as close to peace as you think you’ll ever be - sinks like a stone in the pit of your stomach. It is unimaginable, unbearable.

“I’ve been so angry,” Boris says. “At myself, at you, at world and everybody and everything. I could kill you right now, that’s how angry I am.”

You can feel his anger like a second heartbeat, his arms shaking with it as he pushes you into the sand. In another life you would have said, _Do it. Kill me._ The symmetry is breathtaking - Boris saving your life so many times only to be the one to finally do you in, his hands on your throat like a lover’s caress before squeezing the life out of you. It would be perfect. It would be easy. 

You wonder if that’s what he’s expecting from you - to give up and give in, to take the coward’s way out he’s offering. In the end, you do nothing at all except stare up at the large blur of his face as acute suffocation blackens the edges of your vision, and wait for something to happen. You are both older than you used to be. You tire more easily, which would be embarrassing except that, it seems, he does too.

He removes his arm from your neck and clambers off you to sit on the sand. “долбоеб,” he says, and spits out a mouthful of rainwater. You are not yet distanced enough from your old life to forget what that means. “Do you live near here?”

“Close enough,” you say croakily.

-

It’s awkward, as you would have expected it to be had you ever thought to expect this at all. You’re both uncomfortable, that much is clear, and the room is practically churning with tension - the unease of sharing a space with someone you used to know as well as the back of your hand, but who you now abruptly realize you hardly know at all. The smallness of your apartment only serves to create a sort of forced intimacy, the very air around you tight and claustrophobic. 

After a shower and change of clothes and a bandage applied to the small cut on your foot - which stung like hell the whole walk home because it didn’t seem like a good idea to ask Boris to slow down a bit - you sit on your bed and Boris sits on the couch and you stare at each other like strangers. Silence between the two of you has never felt awkward; you have always been able to simply exist in the same space, no expectations, no time constraints, no pressure to speak if you don’t have anything interesting to say. But now, trapped here by the storm and the circumstances and the humble square footage, you feel like you’re trying to make small talk with a disinterested stranger at a party - in short, anxious and uncomfortable beyond measure.

With your glasses wiped clean of sand and saltwater you can tell he is older, different in ways you didn’t know to expect. Small things, like the way the skin between his eyebrows creases like a thumbprint, even when the rest of his face remains impassive. His hair, strangely, is even darker than you remember. You think bitterly of the silvery gray hairs just starting to sprout at your own temples. Of course Boris would look better than you at forty-something. _Of course_ he would. 

“Why did you come here?” Boris asks after some time. You wonder if he has been noticing these same things about you, the marks time leaves on the lines of our bodies. 

“What do you mean?” you reply. The full answer to his question is too complex for casual conversation.

He looks to the ceiling, the floor, the postcards taped above the stove, souvenirs from tchotchke stalls and museum gift shops. You wonder what he can tell about you from this space, the objects you own; what he thinks of the place you have made into a home. “I mean, why this place and not somewhere else?”

And what do you have to lose by being honest? His friendship? You’ve already lost that a hundred times over.

“I was going to kill myself,” you say. Simple. “I wanted to see _The Goldfinch_ one last time and then I wanted to die.”

Boris does not seem fazed by this. His expression does not change at all. “But you didn’t.”

“No.” Obviously.

“Why?”

“Well. I had to see the painting first, but they kept delaying the restoration. So I had to stick around and wait for a while, and then… I don’t know. I guess I realized I didn’t really want to die.” You shrug. “I just wanted to stop feeling so guilty for everything.”

Boris barks an angry laugh. “So you leave your friends behind to always wonder what happened to you?”

“No,” you say. “I went away so they didn’t have me messing around in their lives anymore. So they could stop worrying about me, and move on and actually be happy.”

“Potter,” Boris says, frowning. “No one was happy with you gone. They were worried, confused. Wanted to know if you were okay.”

“I know. But in the long run,” you shake your head, “it was better for everybody this way.”

You can tell Boris doesn’t like this answer, doesn’t believe it or agree with it, but you don’t really care. It is what it is. You don’t need him to give you false reassurances that it’s not. 

“And did it make you happy? To move here and live by the sea? Away from everyone who knew you?”

You think for a moment very seriously before you answer. “Yes,” you say. “I think it did.”

He is quieter now, far quieter than he used to be. It unnerves you, slightly, because the part of you that remembers being a child in your father’s house still fears these kinds of silences - long, unbroken, unexplained. But you are an adult now, and you have lived silently for years and years. You know Boris will crack under the pressure long before you do.

Sure enough, late in the evening - having taken to wandering restlessly around the apartment - Boris becomes visibly bored of poking through your books and clothes and Dutch-labeled spices. He sighs heavily and mightily and flops back down on the sofa.

“Enough, Potter,” he says. “I am tired of you being so quiet, like church mouse. Tell me something about your life now, help me understand.”

“There’s not much to say,” you reply. “I work at a tourist café on the beach and then I come home to read and think about things.”

“Café is a good start. Very unexpected for the Potter I used to know.”

You shrug. “Not much else to do in Scheveningen.”

“Ah!” Boris looks delighted. “Your pronunciation is very good. Spreek je Nederlands?”

“Een beetje,” you admit. “Most of our customers are American anyway. Or French, but I don’t have the patience to learn French.”

“Mm, me either. Used to be so good at languages, but now I am forgetting words all the time. In Polish, even!” Boris shakes his head. “My god, how embarrassing. But ah, no matter.” He looks up at you. “Tell me something in Dutch.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything! Off the top of your head, something.”

You think for a moment, parsing out the words. “Okay,” you say finally. “Uh, het spijt me. Niet - no, uh - _neem_ me niet kwalijk.”

Boris claps his hands together. “So impressive! Sound just like true Dutchman.”

“Sure,” you say, knowing he hasn’t understood a word. 

The rain is still cracking and snapping against the windowpanes and the afternoon sky has turned pitch-black. It feels like you are at the bottom of the sea, perhaps. Floating under the waves in the very dead of night. Like a dream, like a memory. Like some forgotten taste sticking against your dry tongue. Somehow, despite all of this, the tension in the room has lifted. And, after all, it’s just Boris. Nothing to be afraid of.

You clear your throat. “Well, I don’t know why you’re in town,” you say, and then rush to add, “and it’s not my business” as Boris opens his mouth to speak. “But this - ” pointing to the window, “will probably get worse before it gets better. So you can stay the night. If you want.”

Maybe this is a bad decision. Maybe he’ll kill you in your sleep, one way or another. And maybe he won’t. But Boris simply smiles and thanks you graciously and asks what’s for dinner, all in one breath, and it feels enough like old times that you let yourself relax.

-

You fall asleep quickly, the rain on the window a steady, soothing sound that never fails to knock you out cold, even after all this time. And yet, it’s been years since you shared a bed with anyone, touched another body besides your own. And as Boris snores contentedly on the other side of the bed, your dreams take on a very distinctive theme.

Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth. Hands and skin and sweat. A quick gasp of surprise and a long moan of pleasure. Terrible, terrible things that feel so wonderfully, sickeningly good.

You wake up just as dream-Boris kisses the dip in your back where spine meets tailbone and lie there for a moment in the dark, sparks twinging at odd intervals along your body, trying to remember the shape of the dream as it starts to slip away. For a moment you consider going back to sleep and letting it consume you again, but then Boris snuffles against his pillow and you remember that, for once in a very long time, you are not alone right now. 

So, instead, you tiptoe to the bathroom and stretch out pathetically on the floor, cold tile numbing your ass as you jerk yourself off, and come to the memory of Boris’s bony knees on your chest, his arm against your throat. 

You come out of the bathroom maybe a half dozen minutes later. In the fraction of time between opening the door and flicking off the light switch, the bed is illuminated for just a moment and, in that split-second of light, you can see that Boris is awake and that he is watching you. 

“Sorry,” you say, a knee-jerk apology. Meaning the light, but also the other thing. He says nothing and you crawl under the covers on your side of the bed, waiting for sleep to creep back over you. 

Some indeterminate amount of time later, caught on the twilit verge of wakefulness, you become aware of Boris moving beside you. It is another sluggish handful of minutes before you realize what he is doing, that he thinks you are asleep, and you feel a warm rush of adrenaline settle in your gut. He’s quiet, barely making a sound, but when you cover his hand with your own and begin to help him along, he lets out a sharp exhale that punctures the night like a firecracker. 

It is different than it was when you were thirteen, fourteen, a time in your life that seems so long ago it no longer feels real - no longer feels like something that happened to _you_ , this current, solidified version of yourself. Boris gasps like he’s trying not to make a sound and it’s nothing like you remember, but it’s exquisite and bittersweet in a way it never could have been back then.

You wake up at 6 a.m. to the clamor of your alarm clock, Boris groaning awake beside you with an angry rustle of the bedclothes. “What is that god awful noise?” he says as you roll out of bed and start to dress in the weak light filtering in through the curtains.

“I have to go to work,” you say. “You could always come with me.”

“Nnngh,” he says, ineloquently. “When it is a reasonable hour, maybe.”

You want to kiss him. You want to believe he will still be here this afternoon. “I’ll leave you the address.”

-

So becomes your new normal. It’s not much different from your old normal, the only notable change being the addition of Boris to your daily routine. 

Each morning your alarm goes off at 6 and you rise and dress and ready yourself for the day. On weekdays, you leave by 6:30 to make it to the café before 7. Boris usually comes in for an early lunch and a cup of coffee and he chatters to you as you wipe down tables and count the change in the till. In the afternoons you take a walk on your own for an hour or two while Boris conducts “business” on his phone. You get back to the apartment before dusk, expecting each time to come home to an empty house. But every night, like clockwork, like magic, he’s there waiting for you - assembling sandwiches or stirring soup on the stovetop, one hand on the spoon and the other holding open a paperback from your shelf. 

You eat, you sleep, you talk about things that don’t really matter - and, very rarely, things that matter a great deal - and you do it all over again the next day.

The thing that happened the first night Boris was here doesn’t happen again. There is a not-insignificant part of you that wishes it would. This thought is far less frightening than it used to be, once upon a time. You wonder when that changed, when you started being someone for whom the idea of sleeping with another man was a possibility, a rational desire, and not just a secret, guilt-tinged fantasy.

You’re sober now. Perhaps that’s part of it. You haven’t had more than one drink at a time in over a decade, and usually then only on holidays or when your neighbors host a dinner party. You can’t give up cigarettes, not entirely, but you’re no longer able to chainsmoke your way through a pack a day, and haven’t touched anything harder since the last time you saw Boris.

Boris, for his part, seems to have cut back as well. He teases you for nursing one beer over dinner and then switching to water, but you haven’t seen him drunk since he arrived. And from how clear his eyes are, how regular his sleep schedule seems to be, you can tell he’s not using anything else either. He likes to joke that the two of you are like old women, in bed before ten and drinking tea instead of black coffee in the mornings, but you know you both are far happier like this. Calmer, better people.

“I think I understand now,” Boris says one evening as the two of you are smoking in front of the open window.

“Hm,” you say, lost in your own thoughts and the quiet of the world at this moment.

“Why you live here. Why you left. Still don’t think it was the right thing to do, but I understand why.” He nods to himself. “Is like the song, yes? No alarms and no surprises.”

You think about it for a moment, for the time it takes to inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale again. “Yeah,” you say finally. “I suppose so. Something like that, at least.”

“It’s strange,” Boris says. “You have figured this out for yourself, the meaning of your life - figured it out years ago! - and all this time I have been searching for my own purpose. Where I am supposed to go, what I am supposed to do. Think I am so happy in my life, but it turns out maybe I am not.”

“I don’t think I have it all figured out.”

“Well, maybe. But enough. What do I have? Nothing, I think.”

Boris takes one last drag on his cigarette and stubs it out in the ashtray on the windowsill between you two. “We have had very loud lives, you and I,” he says. “But I think, deep down, we are both quiet people. I have never understood this before but now, I think, I do. It is nice to be quiet sometimes, yes?”

“Yes,” you say, caught off-guard as always by Boris’s perceptiveness. Even as children, he was always able to voice thoughts you couldn’t quite put into words.

Boris turns from the window to look at you. “Do you have a radio?” he asks. “Record player, something?”

“I have a radio,” you say, finishing your own cigarette. “Somewhere around here. Why?”

He shrugs. “I would just like to listen for a while.”

“I don’t know if we’ll get anything in English,” you say, crossing the room to start digging through the closet.

“No matter. Can still listen.”

You leave Boris to fiddle with the radio, trying to tune it to something besides huffy static, and start to wash the plates and cups stacked in the sink. It is several minutes before Boris gets the antenna positioned just right and starts to cycle through stations. In that time, you find yourself watching him across the room, taking in the crease of his brow and twist of his mouth as he frowns down at the radio in his lap. You think of all the places you’d like to touch, right now, and all the places you’ve touched him before. You wonder if you could mark the differences with your hands, with your tongue, with your eyes closed.

“Aha!” he exclaims, spinning the volume dial as high as it will go (which is, pitifully, not very high). “Here, Potter. Listen!”

You turn off the sink and dry your hands on a dish towel, coming to sit beside him on the couch. The radio is playing something soft and melancholy, something your mother might have listened to several decades ago, the sound coming through with hissing pops and crackles from time to time. You don’t recognize the words, but you recognize the way they make you feel. Vulnerable and strangely wistful, scratchy and tender all over, like your skin is trying to shed itself into something new and pink.

“Come,” Boris says, setting the radio carefully against the couch cushions and standing up, his hands held out to you. “Dance with me.”

“What?” But you take his hands anyway, let him pull you to your feet. Let him brace your hands against his shoulders and place his own, lightly, on your waist.

Together, you sway to the music. Slow, and just the slightest bit off-rhythm. _I really don’t know love at all_ , sings the voice on the radio, and you feel it like a toothache - painful and yet hauntingly sweet. 

You’ve been missing this, him, all these years. Missing some vital part of you, like having only one kidney but never knowing it until the one you have fails you. He was right, you think. You _are_ a quiet person. But you are realizing that, perhaps, love is quiet too. And heaven knows you are filled to the brim with love, unshed, a lifetime’s worth. You look up from your feet and into Boris’s black, birdlike eyes and you can tell he sees something in your gaze because he darts his own quickly away.

“This has been nice,” he says, “being here, with you. But I think I should go soon. I think I have - what’s the expression? - out-stayed my welcome.” He laughs, a quiet, broken sound. “You did not even want me here in the first place.”

“Boris…” 

“No, is okay. You came out here to be alone. Fate brings our paths together once more, but now it is time to say goodbye.”

The song has changed to something else just as slow and sorrowful. You are no longer dancing but rather standing and swaying together like a broken metronome. You remind yourself that you are older now and you are able to be soft and vulnerable in front of another person, and so you drop your head on Boris’s shoulder, forehead tucked against the slope of his neck, and begin your confession.

“You’re the only one I ever regretted leaving behind,” you say.

“Me?” Like he doesn’t believe it, like he doesn’t know that he is the best and brightest part of your entire life.

“Yeah, you. I ditched my phone at the airport and caught a plane back to Amsterdam. The shortest flight in the world but I was so scared that if I didn’t get out of there as fast as possible, something would catch up to me and drag me back to my real life.”

Despite your best efforts, you feel yourself start to cry against his shoulder, silent tears curving hotly across the bridge of your nose and plinking off onto the fabric of his shirt. As easy as falling asleep. As natural as a storm squalling over the ocean.

“I found your note a couple days later,” you say. “And that’s when I realized I didn’t have your address, your phone number, no way to contact you.” You laugh. “I could remember your birthday and your home phone number in Vegas clear as day, but what good was that going to do me?”

Boris’s hand curls around the back of your neck, holding you tight against his chest. Your cheek sticks to the wet spot your tears have made. “I could have called Hobie anytime,” you say. “Pippa, Kitsey, whoever. But you - well, you could be anywhere in the world for all I knew.”

“I was so angry,” Boris says, the gravel in his voice your only indication that he, too, is close to tears.

“I know,” you say, nodding. “You deserve to be mad at me.”

“No,” he says. “Not at _you_ , at _me_. Not because you left without saying goodbye, but because I let you go without ever being honest with you.”

“About what?” you ask. You try to force a laugh and fail miserably, so it sounds sort of like a wet cough. “I already know all your secrets.”

“Not _all_. Do you know, for instance, that I thought all these years you were dead? That you had killed yourself because you thought your life had no meaning, that you were doing the world a favor by being gone?”

You are at once horrified and chagrined by how close you came to fulfilling this prophecy. It is enough to keep you silent as Boris tucks his chin protectively over the top of your head.

“Did you know also,” he says, “that you are the love of my life?”

“Don’t - ” you start. Your heart is suddenly heavy and painful in your chest and you can’t bear to hear him continue, can’t stand to hear all the things he might have to say.

“Why? Is true. Swore to myself if I ever saw you again I would tell you right away. Asked God every day to let me see you one last time.” He laughs a little. “You know, when I saw you on the beach I thought I had died, that you were finally coming to collect me.”

“I’m sorry,” you say. “All of it, everything. I’m sorry.”

He kisses the top of your head. “I forgive you, Potter. My prayer was answered, so of course I forgive you.”

“Then don’t leave,” you say.

“Okay,” he says. Like it’s just that easy. “I won’t. We will stay here, or wherever you want to go, and you will never need to know my phone number because I will always be by your side.”

There is a utopia in his words. A promise, a proposal, an impossible dream. In this new world, there will be time to make amends with the people you’ve loved and lost and left. Time to see your bird one last time before you die, or maybe a hundred times, or maybe every single day until you’re too feeble to make it to the museum. And then maybe just one more time after that for good measure. Time to relearn intimacy and honesty and empathy for another person, to rediscover the way you and Boris fit together as people. Time to show him the note you have kept all these years. 

You want to know him every day for the rest of your life. You want years and years of this, more of your life spent knowing him than not-knowing him. Introducing him to your neighbors, your friends. Dancing to slow songs in the space between your bed and the couch. Coming home to cooked meals and the promise of laughter and conversation. 

You want to grow old with him, and he with you. You want to hold him and be forgiven. 

In this new world, in your new life, there will be time for all of this. There’s nothing else you could ever ask for. 

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:  
> \- Een beetje = A little  
> \- Verdacht = Suspicious/shady  
> \- Spreek je Nederlands? = Do you speak Dutch?  
> \- Het spijt me = I'm sorry/forgive me (literally, "it spites me")  
> \- Neem me niet kwalijk = Sorry/forgive me (literally, "take me not evil/wicked")  
> \- долбоеб = Motherfucker/dickhead
> 
> The songs directly referenced in this fic are:  
> \- Radiohead, 'No Surprises' ("no alarms and no surprises")  
> \- Joni Mitchell, 'Both Sides Now' ("I really don't know love at all")
> 
> Other links:  
> \- [Inspiration for the dancing scene](https://hyacintx.tumblr.com/post/189737005705/boris-theo-slow-dancing-to-joni-mitchells-both) (credit to @hyacintx on tumblr)  
> \- [My tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/boxedblondes)
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts!! xx


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